By CASEY KULA
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Aldo Leopold, 1949. That quote appears in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s seminal book, and what inspired me to start down the road of biology and environmental sciences. Learning about the concept of ecosystem services and the benefits nature provides to human survival intrigued me to explore the connection between these services and agriculture. Ecosystem services are categorized into four groups: provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural services. In agriculture, these breakdown as:
- Provisioning services – Nature as a general store, providing food, water, and raw materials.
- Regulating services – Nature as a skilled balancer, maintaining equilibrium through flood control, climate regulation, and even disease prevention.
- Supporting Services – Nature as the unsung hero, creating support through natural processes like soil formation, nutrient cycling, and pollination, all resulting in tangible human benefits.
- Cultural Services – Nature as the intangibles that elevate the human experience, recreation, aesthetics, and spiritual connectedness; the feeling of standing in a field at sunset.
The current dominant point of view values provisioning services at the expense of others, which leads to a degradation of not only the soil but also the benefits soil can provide for the environment. Due to the complex interwoven relationship ecosystem services can present, it’s difficult to see how integrating these concepts is possible. This inspired me to begin graduate school at Southern Illinois University, where my research aimed to answer the question of what ecosystem services benefits are gained from conservation practices in agriculture. Learning about the benefits of adopting soil health practices and responsibly stewarding the land would reveal to me what Leopold meant about “the community to which we belong” and discovering the important human role. Thankfully, after graduating, I was able to continue working in this arena with American Farmland Trust as their new Soil Health Specialist in the Midwest.
In my short time at AFT, I have had the chance to travel around the Midwest and attend various conferences where the topic of cover cropping, farmer viability, and conservation agriculture strategies are discussed. In February, the Midwest Cover Crop Council held its annual conference where Dr. Rob Myers spoke about the goal to cover crop 50 million acres of farmland in America, an increase of about 30 million acres based on a report from the University of Missouri’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture. While doubling the current adoption of cover crops may seem ambitious, cover crops have also covered lots of metaphorical ground. Between the 2017 census and the 2022 census, the dialogue surrounding cover crop adoption has gone from whether implementing cover crops in an operation is feasible or even beneficial to how best to optimize the myriad of conservation practices, including cover crops.
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